


the principles of magnetism

by shuofthewind



Series: The Trick to Binary Stars [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Older Man/Younger Woman, POV Alternating, Skye Swears, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 11:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2346113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s forty when he realizes someone might find it problematic that his soulmate is twenty-seven years younger than him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the principles of magnetism

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [write love on my skin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1835587) by [amusewithaview](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amusewithaview/pseuds/amusewithaview). 



Phil is settled in the idea that he doesn’t have a soul mate when he wakes up one morning to a sharp stinging on the sole of his right foot. He’s twenty-seven and running his first op, out of a backwoods hut in Cuba, and he can’t afford to check it until four days later when he finally peels off his socks and sees _Hey, what up_ tattooed deep in his skin.

He does not tell anyone, and makes it a habit from that point on to always wear socks. He also throws out all of his flip-flops. It’s not like he ever wears them. Besides, he doesn’t need to flash his soulmark at someone who would be better off not knowing that his soul mate even exists.

It’s odd to think that there is someone in the world—or the universe, he realizes, thinking about what he knows from SHIELD—that bears his words on their skin. It’s odd to think that some part of him will cling on in the world after he’s gone.

* * *

You can’t get rid of a soulmark, no matter how hard you try. Mary Sue Poots tries. One night the ward matron walks in to find Mary Sue taking sandpaper to the skin of her thigh. Blood runs down her leg into the shower drain. The matron screams, and rips the sandpaper away from her. Her hands are covered in blood; it’s crusted under her nails, embedded in her skin. She can smell it in her hair when one of the orphanage security guards scoops her up, wraps her leg in a towel, and takes her off to the hospital.

“Child, for heaven’s sake,” says the matron later, when she’s on so much pain medication that the world is shiny all around the edges. “What on earth possessed you? The mark is a gift from God, Mary Sue. I should have thought you would know better than to try and—and desecrate yourself.”

She’s crying. She’s only eleven. “It says I’m a bad guy,” she tells the matron. “It says I—I did something wrong and I’m not, I’m _not_ a bad guy, I’m not, I’m not, I’m _not—_ ”

The matron doesn’t understand. The matron never understands. It’s not the bond, not her soul mate that hurts her, it’s their words. The skin heals. There’s a shiny white scar there, blotched and misshapen. The words still shine through clear. _Sorry for the lack of finesse; Agent Ward here has had a little history with your group, the Rising Tide._ The girl in the next bed over, Selena Hutchins, had seen it one night, and laughed behind her hands. “We always knew you were a bad seed, Mary Sue Poots. No _wonder_ no one wants you.”

After her leg heals, Mary Sue is sent to another foster home. She’s returned within six weeks.

* * *

He’s forty when he realizes someone might find it problematic that his soulmate is twenty-seven years younger than him.

Of course he’s thought of the obvious. Generally bonded pairs aren’t _quite_ so far apart; if he ever meets her (and even thirteen years after the fact he does not know if he actually wants to) there will be odd looks and whispers. But then again, he lives in a business of whispers. He’s used to them.

True to form, it’s Hawkeye’s fault. Clint Barton’s soulmark is long and spiky, tracing along the knobs of his spine. Phil sees it once and only once, when Hawkeye is strapped to a hospital bed for a bullet in the shoulder, and the hospital gown falls away. He checks Barton’s file afterwards, and there’s no record of him being dual-bonded. He already has a mark, a curl of Cyrillic lettering around his right wrist, almost like a bracelet, but that’s platonic gold, not romantic silver.

He confronts Barton about it when he’s let loose from medical treatment, more questioning than anything. He knows why _he_ hides his mark. What he’s not sure of is why Barton’s doing it, when his platonic mark is on display for the world to see.

Barton rubs the back of his neck. It’s the most vulnerable that he has ever been in Phil’s presence, and that includes when SHIELD first brought him in.

“When that was written, I didn’t have one,” he says, and Phil looks down at Barton’s file again. SHIELD had started a record on him back when Barton had been at the circus; the first note was made when he was about fourteen. SHIELD always starts early. “It showed up later. Didn’t see the point in mentioning it.”

Phil makes an _ah_ face. “How old were you?”

“Almost sixteen.” He pauses. “And no, before you ask. Haven’t met them. Don’t particularly plan to.”

Phil cocks his head just slightly to the side. He can’t deny that it’s good that Barton’s denying himself his own soul mate—it means that SHIELD never has to worry about Hawkeye going off the grid for no reason other than _marks_ —but something twists inside his ribcage. It feels unsettlingly like _sympathy_. “Why not?” he asks, because he’s curious. Barton shrugs.

“She’s the same age now as I was then,” he says. “I’m thirty-one this year, Coulson. I’m twice her age. I’m a sniper for the world’s most premier intelligence agency. You think any teenage girl is gonna want a soul mate like me?”

Phil searches his face. The bottom of his foot itches. _Thirteen_ , he thinks. Unlucky thirteen. For the first time he thinks: _what if I meet her tomorrow_? What if he turns a corner and there’s a child looking back at him? Too young to realize it, too young to understand. He has no regret in how he has lived his life. He wonders if she would. “I see,” he says, and Barton’s eyes narrow a little. Then he nods.

“Any more questions for me, sir?”

“No,” says Phil. “You can go, Barton.”

Three years later, Barton shows up with a red-headed waif of a Russian who has a matching golden mark around her right wrist. She’s only just barely twenty-one, and looks about the room with eyes that are older than the century. The mark around her wrist reads _I learned Russian for you, you know._ She rubs it when she thinks no one is looking. 

* * *

Skye turns fifteen camped out on a library bench at three in the morning, boosting free WiFi and trying not to hack up a lung.

She’s been sleeping under a bridge in Chicago. She could probably get a bed in a halfway house, if she tried, or a homeless shelter, but she doesn’t want the paperwork. That’s always where the nuns check first, the Chicago homeless shelters. Chicago’s the easiest place to get to from the orphanage, and other kids who have run away have always been too scared or too stupid to realize the trap they’re walking into. Skye is nothing if not stupid. She sleeps bundled up in heavy coats so no one can see her breasts, hides her hair under a skull cap, and wraps herself around her little backpack with a knife in one hand.

The other people don’t bother her. Mostly. Some businessmen have been hitting on her, but only if she wanders the streets at ass o’clock in the morning with her hair down.

It might not actually be her birthday, she thinks, looking at the flickering date in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. The nuns always say she came into the world at three in the morning on August twenty-first, 1989, but who knows. There isn’t a birth certificate. There aren’t records for her anywhere in the US. It’s probably just be a crock of shit, just like everything else was. Just like everything’s always been.

She rubs her thighs together, feeling the scrape of scar tissue under her torn wool tights. She’ll have to ask her soul mate what her real birthday is, if she ever meets him. After all, _she_ was born with her mark. _He’s_ the one who’ll actually know the date.

If she ever actually meets the son of a bitch.

* * *

Audrey is a mistake.

Her soul mate died years ago. Phil’s always thought it would be better—much better, truth be told—if he never actually meets his (no matter what he wants). He tells her the truth about his mark off the bat, tells her that he was twenty-seven and he doesn’t know if the girl he’s bound to will ever want to accept that.

Still, he can’t help but feel that being with Audrey, sleeping beside her, is hollowing him out, and not filling him up like he thought it would.

* * *

Skye doesn’t find the Rising Tide. The Rising Tide finds her.

Rather, Miles finds her, in a shitty karaoke bar in Tennessee. There are certain places that Skye knows she can always get a network, and this sort of place is one of them.

She’s nineteen. She has a car, clean hair, and a steady stream of work, thanks to her brain. Hacking isn’t the dirtiest thing she’s done to keep herself in food, and above everything else, Skye is _principled_. So she’ll take the sort of jobs that’ll get the little guy back his own, and flip the collective finger to the big nasty bureaucracies that want her to test their antimalware systems. It doesn’t do more than pay gas, but she makes up the rest in pool hustling and judicious borrowing.

Actually, she’s pegged Miles as a pool mark when he sits down opposite her in her booth, and says, “You are _hella_ hard to find.”

His soulmark creeps up his throat like ivy. She watches it move as he talks her into the Rising Tide. She also watches it move when he talks her into bed with him. There’s something delightfully horrifying, she thinks, in sleeping with someone who’s so clearly marked for someone else. Selena Hutchins was right, she thinks. There is something wrong with her, something dirty. She wouldn’t enjoy the sex so much otherwise.

If Miles thinks anything of her own mark, or the scars surrounding it, he never speaks a word.

* * *

Phil Coulson dies on May 4, 2012. He can feel his mark burning.

 _She’s twenty-three_ , he thinks. He’s fifty and dying, and he’s never felt so old.

* * *

On May 9, 2012, Skye rolls out of her cot and hits her head on the floor of her van so hard she has stars in her eyes. They’re still puffy and swollen. She’d cried herself to sleep again last night. _Poor Skye, all alone in the world now. Not even good enough for a soul mate anymore._

When she peels off her pajama pants and looks at her mark, it’s filled back in again, as sharp as it ever was. Only now, there’s a greenish-blue tinge to the silver, like it’s been tarnished.

“Holy _shit_ ,” she says.

* * *

SHIELD knows about his mark now. They can’t not, after him being hospitalized for so long. They’ve made careful note of it in his file, and his doctors like to surprise him with questions. _Do you want to meet your soul mate? Have you met them before? If you haven’t, when did you get the mark?_

Phil smiles at them all and keeps his mouth shut. _Twenty-three_ , he thinks again. That weird twist under his ribcage is back, under the throbbing scar where Loki’s deathstick pierced his heart.

Dying makes you think about things in a way that you never think it will.

* * *

Miles meets his soul mate on a rainy day in August. They’re in New Orleans, following a lead on Centipede, when he quite literally runs into a pretty black girl with long dreads and a nose piercing. “Sorry,” she says, “must’ve lost my footing; the sidewalk ‘round here’s pretty rough.”

Skye goes as stiff as Miles does, because she’s seen those marks. She’s woken up to them, set her nose against them, wondering if the woman they belonged to could feel it.

She quietly backs away. She’s in her van and driving before Miles even notices she’s gone.

* * *

It’s Fury himself who asks him what he’s planning on doing. “Your secret’s out,” he says without preamble, settling himself in the chair by Phil’s desk. No, that’s not quite right. He doesn’t settle; he _sprawls._ Phil’s more curious about why Fury’s coming down to grunt-level himself rather than just requesting his presence.

“I wasn’t aware it was a secret in the first place,” he says in reply. He’s going through a file of crew possibles. Jemma Simmons and Leo Fitz are already pinned to his corkboard. “There’s no regulation against keeping it personal, sir.”

“There is when _personal_ becomes _professional_ ,” says Fury under his breath, and Phil glances up at him over his reading glasses. He’s found that he’s no longer quite so worried about how old they make him look. Not after dying.

“Is there a point to this line of questioning, sir?”

Fury studies him. Then he leans back in the chair. “I like to know where all my pieces are.”

Phil flips his pen between his fingers. “And you think she’ll end up a piece too? Sir.”

“Don’t count your chickens, Coulson,” says Fury, and he gets up and swirls away in a cloud of black.

With a start, Phil realizes he’s smeared his fingers with ink. He pulls a Kleenex from the box on his desk, and frowns.

* * *

When jack-booted thugs throw open the door to her van, Skye knows three things. One: she’s been made. Two: she is royally screwed. And three: this is probably it. Unless at some other point in her life she gets forcibly dragged from her place of residence by dark-suited bozos wearing sunglasses and stinking of corporate corruption, this is it.

There are two of them. One tall, dark, young. All Blue Steel, no mirror to gaze into. The second is older, shorter; his eyes seem kind, but the smile clinging to his lips is…detached, somehow. Like he’s seen it all before. It’s all she sees of them before the bag’s over her head and there are hands on her wrists, holding her close.

Neither of them speak. Not in the car ride back to wherever, not in the walk up the plank, not at all. She wonders which one of them is mulling over her words. What did she even say? _What’s up?_ She wants to gag. She’s always imagined that her mark would have been a lot more kickass than that, because _she’s_ a lot more kickass than that. They took her by surprise. It’s not her freaking fault.

She’s about to pin her money on Blue Steel Boy when the older man opens his mouth, and the words on her thigh buzz inside her skin.

* * *

She comes to show him her mark the night after she’s decided to join the Bus. Skye knocks on the door to his office in short-shorts and a tank-top, not regulation attire by any means, but she’s worrying her lip in a way that he’s learning means _nervous_ , so he doesn’t mention it.

“Hey,” she says, and she scoots into the room. Her eyes catch on the collectibles, and he can see her stowing the information away. _New and improved don’t go together._ He sees the scar on her thigh at the same moment she reaches out to touch her fingertips to the top of his desk.

“So, uh,” she says, and when he lifts his head to meet her eyes, she licks her lips and says it all in a rush. “Ithinkyou’rekindofmysoulmate.”

Phil looks down at his mission report for a moment. “Yes,” he says. “I know.”

“And I—what?” Skye looks at him. Her lips purse. “What do you mean, you _know_?”

“I mean I put it together.” He pushes his chair back and stands. “Not until after you went to collect the audio data, but it did connect eventually. You’ll…have to forgive me for that. I’m not as sharp as I used to be.” Phil makes himself smile. “In my defense, _hey, what up_ is a little generic.”

Skye makes a face at him before she even realizes she’s doing it, and mutters something like, “Not _my_ fault you caught me off-guard.” He’s been quite careful never to imagine what his soul mate like look like. Even if he had, though, she would still be every inch a surprise. When she stands near him he can smell her shampoo, a mix of honeysuckle and something else, and with his newly scarred, stupidly soft heart he thinks that maybe he’s been waiting for his whole life to catch that scent.

“So,” she says. She twists her hands in front of her. There’s a look on her face that reminds him how young she is, like a child that’s lost track of its parents. “I—why didn’t you say anything?”

“Wasn’t the right moment. The op was a bit…time sensitive, after all.” He watches her twist her hair around a fingertip, watches her bounce on the balls of her feet. She has so many tells, this girl, this soul mate of his. He should be frustrated with that. He should not find it endearing. He should not want to look for more. Phil draws a breath, and lets it out. “Skye.”

She jumps a little, and blinks at him. “Yeah?”

“Understandably, this is….difficult.” He rests a hand against the back of his chair. “There are complications that obviously neither of us fully anticipated. Not the least of which being I’m—” _Too old. Too damaged. Too guilty._ “—a bit older than you probably expected.”

Skye studies him for a moment or two. “I don’t know. It’s kinda classy.” She hooks her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts, and rocks on her feet.

“Please let me finish,” he says. _Or I will never get it out._ “I will understand if you want to…forget that this happened, Skye. And if you’ve reconsidered joining us on the Bus—”

He gets the feeling that if he’d slapped her in the face, he couldn’t have offended her more. “Forget?” she says, and her voice doesn’t go shrill like he anticipates, it deepens, goes husky. “Forget? Why would I—” She pinches the bridge of her nose, draws a breath, lets it out. “God. No. I—”

She hesitates. Then she takes a few steps forward, and hooks her hands into the lapels of his suit. Even through the cloth, her touch feels like acid, hot and burning, but he finds himself forgetting to care. Her fingers are shaking. “No,” she says again. “I don’t. But—but if you don’t want to—I mean, if you think—”

“Skye.” She goes still. Phil lifts his hand to her jaw, brushes his fingers against her chin. After all, he’s broken decades of protocol for this girl already, before he even put it together who she was; what’s a few fraternization rules mixed up in that? (His brain is already churning. _She's a risk. She's vulnerable. She makes the team vulnerable. The rules are there for a reason._ He should care more. But right now, with her standing in front of him, showing off the scar, showing off the words. He's not Phil Coulson anymore.) “I want you to feel comfortable here,” he says. “If that means you wish to leave, then I will not stop you. But—” he adds, and for the first time in immeasurable years, his voice cracks. “But I would—I would like it if you stayed. Very much.”

Skye gives him a long, considering look. Then she tightens her grip on his suit jacket, leans forward, and presses her lips to the corner of his mouth. She’s warm skin and bright light and honeysuckle in his nose, and Phil stiffens. He doesn’t do what he _wants_ to do, which is kiss her back, slow and dirty, the way he has never allowed himself to want to. She shifts back, studies his expression again. She has a bit of Natasha in her, he realizes. Only twenty-three, but her eyes are older than they should be. “Twenty-four hours ago,” she says, “you wouldn’t even have seen me leave.” Then she cups his face in her hands and kisses him again, full on the mouth. Phil can’t help it. He sets a hand to the small of her back and pulls her closer to him, touching his tongue to hers, breathing her in, the taste of her, and that’s a part of him too, that’s something that he’d never known he’d wanted to taste before. He weaves the fingers of his free hand into her hair. Skye’s mouth opens under his, and she’s not passive; she clings to him, her nails digging into his shoulders, scraping at the nape of his neck in a way that makes his whole spine flush.

Finally, she breaks away, but she does not back up. She slides her arms tight around him and hides her face in the fabric of his suit, and Phil can’t help it. He sets his cheek to her hair and closes his eyes for a moment, a stupid old man indulging in a fantasy of something he has not ever deserved. Finally, she shifts, and mumbles something into his collarbone.

“Skye?” he says, and she pulls back just far enough for him to make it out.

“So are you gonna explain why the hell you were dead for five days?” she asks. “Or is that something else I’m going to have to hack?”


End file.
